It is common knowledge that the Federal Reserve System was originally set up to provide the nation with a stable currency and a sound banking system. Less well known, however, is why the Fed was given an operating role in the nation's payments system. In this article, James N. Duprey and...

The recent decline in the Federal Reserve’s check volumes has received a lot of attention. Although switching to electronic payments methods and electronic check-processing has been credited for much of that decline, some of it could be caused by changes following bank mergers involving...

The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (the Check 21 Act) was designed to facilitate technological innovation by accelerating the transition to electronic check processing. Yet, in adopting Check 21-related processing, banks must also appropriately identify and mitigate potential risks...

As the dominant provider of payments services, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve provides such services in an important public policy issue. This paper examines the productivity of Federal Reserve check-processing offices during 1980-1999 using non-parametric estimation methods and...

Check 21 is changing how the country’s checks are processed. The Boston Fed’s Carol Lewis answers questions about how this new law affects consumers.

Assessing the differing impacts of a new computer technology on skills and pay in two departments of a large bank.

This paper investigates whether the services of the Federal Reserve System improved the efficiency of the system in the United States for collecting checks relative to the efficiency of the system used by banks just prior to the formation of the Federal Reserve. There are two types of evidence...

This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal Reserve check processing offices over 1980–2003. We extend results from Park et al. (2000) and Daouia and Simar (2007) to develop an unconditional, hyperbolic, a-quantile estimator of efficiency. Our new estimator is fully...